Keynote Address to the First International Symposium on
the Philosophy of Thomé H. Fang, in commemoration of the 10th Anniversary
of Fang’s passing, held August 15-18, 1987, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.

Esteemed colleagues,
friends, and fellow admirers of Thomé H. Fang:

It is a pleasant privilege
to meet with you in this symposium and share memories of past associations
with him while noting appreciatively some of his achievements as one of
the great scholar-teachers in philosophy of our time. As a philosopher he
exemplified his own ideal of the combined personages of poet, prophet, and
sage. My associations with him and my acquaintance with his philosophy
are far less extensive than those of various of you, but there may be some
value in seeing how he appears from my particular perspective.

I first met him in 1960 when
he came to Washington University in St. Louis for presentation ceremonies
in connection with a gift arranged by Professor Constant C. C. Chang of
National Taiwan Normal University of some valuable Chinese documents to
the Washington University Library. At the time I was Chairman of the
Philosophy Department and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences there, and Professor Fang was on visiting appointment at the
University of Missouri in Columbia. Afterwards we met at various
philosophy meetings—for example, the East-West Philosophers’ Conferences
in Honolulu in1969--and had some good discussions. And even a brief
philosophical conversation with him was enough to suggest something of the
depth and range of his scholarship, the keenness of his understanding of
basic issues and problems, and the aptness of his grasp of major movements
and figures in the history of culture. We also corresponded in connection
with recommendations he wrote for various of his students who were
interested in doing graduate work in philosophy at Southern Illinois
University in Carbon-dale, and I learned a great deal about him from these
bright youngsters after they came to study with us.

Another eminent Chinese
philosopher who wrote recommendations to us for some of his students was
Professor T’ang Chün-i of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His former
students, like Professor Fang’s, were justifiably proud of their erstwhile
mentor. And in spite of what the two masters had in common, the students
sometimes liked to speak of them as representing different philosophical
traditions. T’ang’s students stressed his contributions to methodology and
epistemology whereas Fang’s students pointed to his interpretations of
Chinese world views and to his cultural emphasis. At any rate, thanks to
these two and various other Chinese teachers of philosophy who sent us
their students, Southern Illinois University was fortunate to have for a
time what Professor Y. P. Mei called the largest collection of able
Chinese graduate students to be found anywhere. Thomé Fang’s own
characterization of himself as a philosopher, as quoted in an early
version of Professor George Sun’s “Profile” of him, admirably outlines the
broad range of his philosophical affiliations. “I am,” he declared, “a
Confucian by family tradition; a Taoist by temperament; a Buddhist by
religious inspiration; moreover, I am a Westerner by training.”[i]

Both in terms of subject
matter and audiences addressed, for more than fifty years he combined East
and West, and his normal discourse was filled with illuminating
comparisons. Even when he was not making explicit comparisons between East
and West or between various streams of, say, Chinese philosophy, what he
said of any given topic was uttered with contrasting possibilities in
mind. He drew in depth on the traditions of Ancient Greece and Modern
Europe in the West as well as on those of China and India in the East,
among others, and he made such extensive use of the fields of science,
art, and religion when he philosophized that they as well as philosophy
may be listed as his areas of special concern. For a good part of his
career he interpreted Western philosophy for his Chinese students, but
from his own student days on he also presented Eastern thought for
Westerners. For example, in the 1960s while holding visiting appointments
at universities in the United States and lecturing widely there, he
concentrated mainly on interpreting Chinese philosophy for Western
audiences. For the final years of his life at National Taiwan University
and Fu Jen Catholic University, however, he shifted his center of interest
from teaching classical Western philosophy to lecturing on the spirit and
development of Chinese philosophy. But even when focusing on Chinese
thought, on a page or two he sometimes brought in a host of illustrations
from outside China and referred to such people or works as William Blake
the English poet, Augustine’s City of God, the Christian Book of
Revelations, Plato’s Dialogues, Goethe’s Faust, Nietzsche’s Birth of
Tragedy, Tagore on religion, E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of
Modern Physical Science, Spengler’s Decline of the West, and various
others to show that certain characteristics of Chinese metaphysics are not
peculiar to the Chinese mind but that their counterparts may be found in
Indian religion, the Bible, and various periods of Western thought[ii]

The spirit of Chinese
philosophy as Fang saw it comes out with special clarity in his treatment
of Chinese metaphysics, and I shall comment briefly on a few of his major
tenets or emphases in metaphysics.

First, Fang was eclectic in
his views. In the West too frequently we tend to hold that there is only
one sound metaphysics and that views which differ from the one we accept
must be wrong; but Fang in characteristic Chinese fashion believed that
commitment to one world view should not shut us off from the wisdom
accumulated by other great world views. Insights into the nature of
things are not the exclusive possession of any one world view, and we
should be glad to grow from the insights of other outlooks as well as from
our own. As Fang noted, Bertrand Russell asserted that “to realize the
unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom”;[iii]
but for Fang the Elysium of blissful wisdom requires more approaches than
one. The Confucian might equally well say that to realize the importance
of time is the way to wisdom, and it might been even better for us to
realize both the importance and the unimportance of time, depending on the
context. The Taosist, according to Fang, transfigures the eternal into
the enjoyed space of lyrical art or romantic poetory, and the Buddhist
starts with incessant change and suffering and ends by rejoicing in the
fulness of a dharma conceived under the form of eternity. Accordingly,
not surprisingly, when he sketched Chinese metaphysics in his great work,
Chinese Philosophy: Its Spirit and Its Development, he did so in terms of
four different clusters of views: Confucianism, Taosim, Mahayanist
Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism, and his account of these four is
interlarded with references to various Western traditions. Within this
framework he did not think that acceptance of the central tenets of
Confucianism, for example, ruled out Taoism, Buddhism, and
Neo-Confucianism. Indeed, he was convinced that one important asset of
his own organismic outlook was that it managed to combined the distinctive
contributions of each of these contrasting views without robbing them of
their distinctiveness.

Fang developed a distinctive
form of organicism growing out of what Stephen C. Pepper, in his World
Hypotheses, called the root metaphor of the organic whole or organism.
One finds manifestations of this in his Chinese Philosophy, but it was set
forth at length, first in Chinese and later in English translation, in The
Chinese View of Life: A Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony (1956, 1980).
Fang’s early study of Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead, among others,
coupled with his ancestral Confucianism, helped orient his organicism
towards the process tradition. As a graduate student (1921-1924) he took
leave of E. B. McGilvary and the University of Wisconsin for a year to
study Hegel with J. A. Leighton at the Ohio State
University.

The appeal of organicism for
him was partly that this view recognized and had a place for not simply
one but a multiplicity of philosphical outlooks, each of which had a
unique contribution to make. Also, organicism had for him the great merit
of making values central whereas some forms Western naturalism seemed to
read values out of nature and turn nature into an abstract mechanical
order. He argued that nothing is more real than the world of active human
endeavors in which people strive in diverse ways to ward off the less
good and realize the good through fulfilling their human nature. Again, I
think Fang would have appreciated John Dewey’s confession that Hegelian
organicism freed him from a host of hard and fast dualisms, for Fang’s
view denounced disconnectedness and the possibility of treating things
and persons as members of absolutely isolated systems. It also cried out
against “reducing the plenitude of reality into an impoverished
mechanical order of merely juxtaposed constituents” and squeezing the
dynamical universe into a tightly closed, completed system with no room
for creativity.[iv]
On the positive side, organicism tries to encompass the integral universe
in all aspects of its riches and plenitude, clarifying experiential
multiplicities through discerning such organic wholes as the unity of
being, the unity of existence, the unity of life, and the unity of value
and seeking a comprehensive harmony. For we must not forget that “all the
manifold unities are such that they can be twined and fused into an
intimate embracement of mutual relevance, essential interrelatedness, and
reciprocal importance.”[v]

For Fang, metaphysics is not
an Aristotelian noting of facts. Things are rarely as simple as they may
appear to philosophers operating under the ideal of literal reporting.
What appears as an elementary quality to a mechanistic naturalist may look
far more complex to one with Fang’s outlook. The simple quality of sound,
color, or whatever under his treatment is likely to be a rich texture of
distinguishable strands, each of which has its own history. Each
philosophical system, moreover, brings its own way of interpreting what
is, and we cannot say what the world is apart from perspectives. What we
find in each case is a world which has been transfigured or transmuted.
For the Confucian or Neo-Confucian the transfigured realm is primarily a
moral universe. For the Taoist it is an aesthetic domain, and for the
Buddhist it is a religious realm. Each transfigured world offers a
teleological system with its own set of values and its own way of
understanding human destiny, and the human task is conceived differently
in these different domains. For the Confucian the primary goal of the
human being is moral edification. For the Taoist it is artistic
liberation and for the Buddhist, religious purification. Granted these
activities, one may find one’s place in the combined transfigured world of
moral, aesthetic, and religious perfection.[vi]

On this view such basic
concepts of metaphysics as the nature of human individuals are not
problems to be posed once for all, with answers to be found ready-made
once for all. The questions about these concepts have to be continually
asked, and in different eras of time and in various contexts of thought
the answers may be radically different.[vii]
So the richness of meaning of these concepts requires us not to rest
with an overly simplified unitary approach but rather to open ourselves to
new possibilities.

Writing in a time when many
philosophers in the West regarded metaphysics as a dubious type of
inquiry, Fang made it central for his investigations into the spirit and
development of Chinese Philosophy. Many if not most of his contemporaries
in the West held to the ideal of literalness in philosophical expression
and regarded philosophy ideally as being close to science, especially
abstract sciences like logic and mathematics; and when some of them spoke
of metaphysics as poetry, these were not words of praise but indications
of how far in their view such discourse was from precise, unambiguous,
literal science. Fang, however, shared with Whitehead the notion that
philosophy was closely akin to art and poetry. For him, as for Stephen
Pepper, metaphors, far from being inappropriate to philosophical
discourse, provided fresh insights into the nature of things. The great
philosopher, in his view, is a combination of poet, prophet, and sage,
with the proportions of the poetic, prophetic, and sagacious varying from
philosopher to philosopher. Fang praised especially the Taoist’s poetical
inspirations but noted the Confucian charisma of a sage and the Buddhist
hope of becoming a prophet.

To understand our culture
the role of constructive reason is important, but much more is needed.
Myth, religion, and art cannot be overlooked; and in sketching the
historical drift of early Chinese philosophy, Fang used a musical figure
to suggest the metaphysical moods as chords sounded over the centuries in
the triads of myth, religion, and poetry.[viii]
These three may afford insights, sometimes into depths as yet unspoken,
and optimally philosophy in its pursuit of understanding seeks to
rationalize them, not to explain them away.

In terms of world views
there are some noteworthy parallels between Fang and such contextualists
as Bergson, Dewey, Pepper, and myself; and perhaps the wonder is why his
position and theirs are not even closer. But the contextualists are known
for their diversity, and there are significant differences between any two
of them, In his Profile of Fang George Sun tells us that John Dewey in
1920 at the University of Nanking was Fang’s first teacher of Western
Philosophy: the Ancient Period and that he was initially very much
impressed with Dewey as a historian of ideas but that he found himself
unable to appreciate the latter’s pragmatism.[ix]

One needs to remember, of
course, that this was the Dewey of Reconstruction in Philosophy rather
than the Dewey of Art as Experience. He had lectured in Japan on
Reconstruction in Philosophy and then repeated these lectures at various
universities in China. Although he also gave many other lectures in
China, the substance of Reconstruction in Philosophy was probably central
to his thinking at the time, and various of his emphases in this work were
probably less congenial to Fang than the major tenets of his classic work
on aesthetics. For example, in the earlier work Dewey emphasized
instrumental scientific knowledge as over against contemplation and held
that classic Greek metaphysics was a compensatory device to justify
traditional moral and social values by placing them in a timeless domain
where everyday critical inquiry could not touch them. The instrumentalist
Dewey emphasized means-end relations throughout and strongly suggested
that the technical, manipulative knowledge of the artisans was more
responsive to the genuinely real than the dialectically formal
philosophical knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, and quite possibly Fang
thought that he was too much concerned with means at the level of common
sense. At any rate, Art as Experience would have been better suited to
his temperament. This work stressed vivid, intense, clarified, and
organized experiences, insisted that experience in the full sense of the
term is aesthetic experience, and contained in addition to distinctively
contextualistic features some echoes of Hegel which Fang would have
appreciated.

The main parallel between
the contextualists and Fang concerns their common emphasis on the
importance of time and change, notwithstanding the fact that their
statements concerning this topic take very different forms.
Contextualists find the root metaphor or key reality to be historical
events, happenings, or occurrences. Although some things change at slower
rates than others and thus give a relative stability, no concrete things
exist apart from temporal process with its mixture of contingency and
stability, the novel and the routine. Historical events, viewed not as
something past and done with but rather as dynamic, living presences, have
within them movements from and toward other events and always occur in
contexts and have reference to other events within these contexts. Each
occurrence is a web or texture of strands or tendencies all interwoven
into integral wholes each with its own individual character or quality.
Nature, accordingly, is a scene of incessant beginnings and endings; and
initiations, consummations, blockings, with connecting references and
intervening means-objects or instruments operating within a specific
context, are basic features of the process. In this setting Dewey
stressed the importance of instruments for effecting desired changes or
blocking harmful ones.

An emphasis on time is part
of Fang’s Confucian background, and change is a central theme of both his
Confucianism and his overall organic view. It is also focal, of course,
for the Buddhist, who starts with incessant change and suffering, and for
the Taoist, who seeks to view it under the aspect of eternity. As the
Confucian Book of Change has it, change is great and comprehends
everything.[x]
Or to quote or paraphrase various passages from Fang’s Chinese Philosophy,
nature is the scene of an incessant process of succession, constant
renovation, ever dispensing with what is old and antiquated, and evermore
begetting what is new and timely.[xi]
The universe “is an all-comprehensive urge of life, and all-pervading
vital energy, not for a single moment ceasing to create and procreate and
not in a single spot ceasing to overflow and interpenetrate.”[xii]
“The stream of life coincides with the stream of time in which we cannot
step twice into the same waters. The antecedent, which occurs in any
moment of time and soon becomes old and antiquated, is continued into the
consequent which, as a fresh time-bud, is a creative novelty evolving from
the given duration to be incessantly succeeded and superseded by whatever
is new, again and again,” thus producing infinitely varied novelty. [xiii]

In a passage with both
Hegelian and Whiteheadian overtones, Fang summarized the organicistic
implications of the philosophy of change:

Metaphysically, the
philosophy of change is a system of dynamic otology based upon the
process of creative creativity as exhibited in the incessant change of
time as well as a system of general axiology wherein the origin and
development of the idea of the Supreme Good is shown in the light of
comprehensive harmony. Thus the principle of extensive connection asserts
at the same time that the confluence of life, permeating all beings under
heaven and on earth, partakes of the creative process of time, and
achieves, as a natural consequence, the form of the Supreme Good. From
the viewpoint of organicism, no set of fundamental principles formulated
in a system of metaphysics can be cut and thrust into an air-tight
compartment without interpenetration. And, therefore, the principle of
extensive connection serves as a prelude to the principle of creative
creativity which, in turn, furnishes a keynote to the principle of life in
the process of value realizations.[xiv]

It will be noted that for
Fang the creative process is teleological and laden with values.

A second parallel between
Fang and the contextualists is their working practice in analysis.
Contrary to the dominant tradition which views analysis as an affair of
breaking a whole down into atomic units or permanent pellets, both Fang
and the contextualists question the existence of such units and think of
analysis as a matter of tracing tendencies from beginning to endings or
points of convergence with other tendencies. Thus they find genetic
accounts of particular tendencies or movements far more illuminating than
attempts to reduce them to abstract elements. They are more interested in
the way in which movements interweave and interpenetrate or fuse with
other movements—Fang usually spoke of interpenetration whereas Pepper or I
would characterize it as fusion; and they are impressed with the
difference a new context can make in the quality or character of a given
web or texture of tendencies. No strand can be understood separately but
must be interpreted in the context of other strands with which it is
intertwined or to which it is mutually relevant. Accordingly, contextual
interpretation is needed to exhibit a dovetailing of interrelated
meanings.

A third parallel is their
opposition to dualisms and the method of bifurcation. Among the
contextualists Dewey was especially known for his stand against dualisms
and such sharp metaphysical dichotomies as those between self and the
world, soul and body, nature and God, subject and object, matter and
spirit or mind, the human and the divine, and the Finite and the infinite.
Typically, when he opposed a view it was very likely to be at least in
part because it set up an unbridgeable gap of some sort. Fang also
opposed the method of bifurcation and found it uncharacteristic of the
Chinese spirit. For him a characteristic Chinese doctrine “rejects neat
bifurcation as a method” and “disowns hard dualisms as a truth.”[xv]

Still other parallels
between Fang and the contextualists might be noted, but I shall mention
only one more which grows in part out of their accounts of change:
namely, their openness to new systems of ideas, culture patterns, and ways
of doing things. Both had misgivings about orthodoxies, stereotypes, and
exclusive allegiance to closed systems of thought. Both stressed novelty.
Whereas some try to explain away novelties, both Fang and the
contextualists accepted them. Like William James, Fang and the
contextualists were ready to hear unfamiliar ideas and to try new cultural
patterns and ways of doing things. One striking illustration of Fang’s
openness to new ideas and cooperative dialogue between East and West may
be found in his modification of his standard rendition of his own name
from Fang Hsün, Tung-mei, to Thomé H. Fang to make it easier for
Westerners to identify him and thus facilitate communication.

To conclude, however, the
title I chose for my remarks today, “Thomé H. Fang and the Spirit of
Chinese Philosophy,” has enabled me to sample his contributions to
metaphysics and comparative philosophy, but it is a topic vast enough for
volumes. It is a subject which each of us will see somewhat differently
but one to which each of us has a contribution to make. The rich
multiplicity of interwoven details and contrasting perspectives he adduced
in connection with every metaphysical concept he treated serves to enrich
our appreciation of both Thomé Fang and the spirit of Chinese philosophy
he exemplified.

This symposium, I suggest,
does at least two important things. First, it celebrates our common
devotion to Fang’s ideal of improved mutual understanding between peoples
of all nations, and secondly, it commemorates his work and spirit, not
because all of us agree with all the stands he took, but rather primarily
because he had something helpful or insightful to say about a vast range
of topics and issues of continuing concern, a way of drawing upon major
historical traditions to show how they could illuminate some of our
contemporary problems, and an infectious manner of getting us to share his
delight in tracing their varied contributions.

Notes

[1]
Keynote Address to the First International Symposium on the
Philosophy of Thomé H. Fang, in commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of
Fang’s passing, held August 15-18, 1987, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.

Editor’s Note: The Speaker, our esteemed Editorial Advisor, is a most
distinguished philosopher and educator in America. He was the architect
and founder of the Ph.D. programs on three campuses: University of
Missouri, Columbus; Washington University, St. Louis, MI.; Southern
Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. As well as the founder of the
world-known Center for John Dewey Studies, Carbondale, Il. He is the
author of A Contextualist Theory of Perception, Enhancing Cultural
Interflow between East and West, and A Contextualistic View of Life,
co-author (with John Dewey, etc.) of Value: A Cooperative Inquiry,
besides numerous comments and reviews, articles and speeches in the
academic proceedings and professional journals. He was awarded with the
unique honor as “Man of the Year in Philosophy” (1967) and “Lifetime
Achievement” (1997) by American Philosophical Association , etc. He
retired at 92.